Template for teaching purposes

[jmgirard]

Description

When teaching, I need students to render their QMD files to HTML with resources embedded so that they can easily share these files with me without the formatting breaking. However, it is a pain to have to teach them about YAML headers at the very beginning. I would rather circle back to this later. I think a good solution for this would be something like a Quarto version of RNotebooks - a file type or format that automatically embeds resources and perhaps turns on paged df printing. Ideally, there would be a way to create such a file through the RStudio IDE directly (e.g., either a different file type or a checkbox on the Quarto document wizard).

[mcanouil]

You are describing a format template extension, see https://quarto.org/docs/extensions/formats.html.

Then your students, will only have to run quarto use template <gh-organization>/<extension> (https://quarto.org/docs/extensions/formats.html) and start working on the Quarto document.

[jmgirard]

This is a good start, but I'd ideally like it to be built into RStudio somehow. Teaching them quarto CLI commands is on a similar level of technicalness as customizing the YAML header. Do you know if it is possible to add new file types through an RStudio addon?

[cscheid]

That would be a question for https://github.com/rstudio/rstudio or their discussion forums.

[mcanouil]

See #2079 for related if not identical discussion.

[jmgirard]

Thanks @mcanouil that seems super relevant.

[mcanouil]

FWIW, I don't think asking your students to copy paste a quarto command on the terminal within RStudio is "too advanced".
They are running commands in R 😅

[jmgirard]

As surprising as it might seem, this is a barrier to entry for some newbies. I am trying to bring people with zero programming experience into R. They are just wrapping their minds around the R console and it would be confusing and error-prone to introduce another, secondary console (i.e., the terminal) with different commands just to use it once and never again.

[mcanouil]

I see.

Even if you had a button in the RStudio interface, it would require them to install an R package, likely from GitHub, thus using non R base function, etc.
In the end, I am not sure it is less error prone. 🤷‍♂️